It just occurred to me that though I have written a lot on the topic of article marketing on my virtual assistant blog, I haven’t touched on it a lot over here. And since it is a website promotion service we offer, I might give a little background info. or the W’s (who, what, where and why) of article marketing.

As I see it, there can be many benefits to using articles to promote your site. Two always rise to the top of the list in my mind:

1. Well-written, informative articles can help establish you as an expert in your field.
2. In the all powerful eyes of Google, Yahoo and the rest of the bunch, links coming into your site from relevant sites are, if not the Holy Grail, pretty dang important! It’s basically the same as number one but with computers instead of people. The search engines see links to your site as recommendations or votes for your website. So the more links you have coming into your site from other sites that are in related fields, the higher your search engine rankings will eventually get.

So how does writing an article get other people to link to your site?

Well, for one, always display your article on your own website or blog. When people run across it or find it by searching, they might just link to your site to refer their clients or readers there. But most importantly, when writing articles for the purpose of website marketing, you must submit your articles to article directories.

Article directories are just what they sound like. They are like giant filing cabinets full of articles that people have submitted. When you submit an article to a directory, you are giving permission to the directory and anyone else who might come across your article to reprint your article. This is where the links come in.

All directories(or at least all the directories that you submit to) allow you to include an author resource box, basically an “About the Author” section that gives a brief bio about you and a certain number of links (typically 3 or less) to your website or relevant sites you are associated with in some way. Webmasters are always looking for great content to put on their websites and blogs, and this way any time they use your article, they’ll be linking to your site.

So where do you submit your articles?

There are lots of services that offer article submission. Also, many virtual assistants offer that service too. In the past, I have used Article Marketer. If you’re really not wanting to spend the time to submit them yourself, you can certainly use on of these services. Personally, I stopped using them and submit articles manually these days both for myself and my clients. I like to have control over where the articles are going, and I like to have the option of changing up the resource boxes when I submit to different places. That allows me to track which ones work best and tweak them.

I’ve often found that submitting to a few of my favorite standby article directories can be just as effective as when I used a service to submit to hundreds.

A few of my favorite article directories that I always submit to first are:

• Ezine Articles
• Go Articles
• Article Dashboard
• Article Alley

There are literally hundreds if not thousands of them…if you have more, feel free to add to this list in comments.

Well, I could literally go on for several hours about the ins and outs of article marketing and preaching the Gospel of content and links. But I think that’s it for this post. Now that I’ve realized that I am seriously lacking in my article marketing blogging though…keep an eye out for more article marketing posts for the all-important How, that you might have noticed I left out of this one!

Please feel free to leave your thoughts, links to other article directories, questions or advice for fellow article marketers in the comments section below. Where do you submit articles? Have you found articles to be a beneficial marketing tool?

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